(avg. read time: 10–19 mins.)
No other feature of Easter inspires more uninformed ramblings than the name itself. The popular memes linking Ishtar to Easter would never exist and produce so many unsubstantiated claims to support themselves if not for the name “Easter.” Nothing about Easter causes more talk about its supposed pagan origins than the name. What then is the significance of this day being named as it is?
First of all, anyone who tells you that “Ishtar” and “Easter” are pronounced the same way is talking nonsense. That is, unless they are pronouncing “Easter” while doing a Sean Connery impression. “Ishtar” is the best English approximation of the Akkadian, whereas “Easter” comes from either a German or Anglo-Saxon term, depending on what hypothesis you accept (see below). The words have no more to do with each other than “luster” and “Leicester.”
Second, if the name did come from Ishtar or another pagan goddess, that is not significant in and of itself. Think of the names for the days of the week, at least in English. What does Tuesday have to do with the god Tyr? Or Wednesday with Odin/Woden? Or Thursday with Thor? Or Friday with Frig? Or Saturday with Saturn? Do Sunday and Monday have any peculiar and lasting connection with the sun and moon? Or could it simply be that the only thing these various sources lent to the days named after them is their names?
Third, whatever account one gives for the origin of the name “Easter,” it cannot also be an account for the origin of the holiday. To illustrate this, let us see what languages besides English and those that use “Easter” as an English loanword have called the day something related to “Easter”:
German: Ostern
That’s it. But even among the languages of the British Isles, it is not as if the day has been universally called “Easter.” Some of the Old English writers referred to it as Pascan (Byrhtferth) or Pasches (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). In Scots it is Pace (which has also influenced what others in Britain call the eggs associated with the holiday). In Welsh it is Pasg. And in Irish it is some form of Cáisc/Cásca. All of these forms are related to a common root that comes from a decidedly different source.
The reader will notice that in the past entries I have typically called the day “Pascha.” That is because this was the universal form of reference to the day in Latin (Pascha) and Greek (Πάσχα), both of which also referred to Passover. The Latin derived from the Greek and the Greek derived from the Aramaic פסחא and the Hebrew פסח. Most European languages besides the most popular strand of English and references around the world also came from this common root:
Some Old English references: Pascan/Pasches
Scots: Pace
Welsh: Pasg
Irish: Cáisc/Cásca
French: Pâques
Spanish: Pascua
Portuguese: Páscoa
Italian: Pascua
Dutch: Pasen
Faroese: Páskir
Danish and Norwegian: Påske
Icelandic: Páskar
Swedish: Påsk
Romanian: Paşti (otherwise referred to as Înviere “Resurrection”)
Albanian: Pashka/Pashkët
Russian: Paskha
Egyptian (Coptic): Pesach
Ge’ez and other Ethiopian-Eritrean languages: Fasika
Zulu: iPhasika
Swahili: Pasaka
Afrikaans: Paasfees
Malagasy: Paka
Turkish: Paskalya
Arabic (MSA): عِيدُ الْفِصْح (‘Īdu l-Fiṣḥ; “Festival of Passover”) or عِيدُ الْقِيامَة (‘Īdu l-Qiyāmah; “Festival of Resurrection”)
Farsi: عید پاک (Eyde Paak)(“Pure/Holy Feast”)
Indonesian and Malay: Paskah/Paska
Filipino: Pasko ng Pagkabuhay
Because of the widespread presence and influence of English on the one hand and the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches on the other, many countries not represented above may popularly or ecclesiastically refer to the day as either “Easter” or “Pascha,” but these terms are clearly loanwords from elsewhere.1 Still, in many of these cases, languages have produced their own terms for referring to the day with different etymologies otherwise unrelated to Easter or Pascha, which include:
Armenian: Zadig (perhaps an attempted translation of “Passover/Pesach” that initially designated both Passover and the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection as “Feast” days)
Czech: Velikonoce (“Great Night”)
Polish: Wielkanoc (“Great Night”) or Wielka Niedziela (“Great Sunday”)
Bulgarian: Velikden (“Great Day”)
Macedonian: Veligden (“Great Day”)
Hungarian: Húsvét (“Taking the Meat”)2
Finnish: Pääsiäinen (a word invented by Bible translator Mikael Agricola, meaning “Liberation,” and thus still conceptually related to Passover)
Akan (Ghana): Yesu Wu Sore (“Jesus’s Death and Rising”)
Ga (Ghana): Christo gbele ke Shite (“The Rising of Christ”)
Yoruba: Ajodun Ajinde (“Festival of Resurrection”)
Efik: Ediset (“Resurrection”)
Syriac: Qyomto (“Resurrection,” related to Hebrew and Arabic terms for the same)
Hindi: Punarutthan Divas (“Resurrection Day”)
Mizo: Thawhlehna Ni (“Resurrection”)
Nepali: Punaruthan mahotswav (“Resurrection Celebration”) or Punaruthan Aitabar (“Resurrection Sunday”)
Burmese: Tanin-kanoi (“Seventh Day”)
Mandarin: 复活节 (Fu Huo Jie; “Resurrection Festival”)
Cantonese: 復活節 (Folk Woot Tsit; “Festival of Resurrection”)
Korean: 부활절 (Boo Hwal Jeol; “Season of Resurrection”)
Japanese: 復活祭 or 復活日(Hukkatsusai or Hukkatsubi; “Resurrection Festival” or “Resurrection Day”)3
With all of this information before us, and making the absolute best assumptions for the Ishtar-Easter connection—i.e., that the name derives from Ishtar precisely because it was a celebration of Ishtar—one must wonder how the name supposedly moved west from the Assyrians and Babylonians, passed through lands speaking Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, then through dozens of lands that developed different languages, all without leaving a trace in the name of the day in those dozens of languages, only to reemerge in German and a certain strand of English. Even in the eastward expansion of Christianity, it left no trace, except, apparently, where English had influence. In none of these languages do we even see an attempt to translate the name into the name of any goddess or god that is a rough equivalent of Ishtar. If we accept the premise that the mere name of the holiday conveys its origins (which cannot necessarily be taken for granted, but must be demonstrated), does not all of this evidence indicate that the origins lie in conjunction with Passover and the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection, not with Ishtar?
But a question still remains: Why is the day called “Easter” where it is so called? The earliest explanation comes courtesy of the Venerable Bede: “Eosturmonath [April] has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month’, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance” (The Reckoning of Time 15).4 Jacob Grimm, the philologist behind the famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales and other important works on German language and culture, expanded on this note with claims that Eostre was the goddess of dawn (due to this term being similar to a broad Indo-European tendency to use similar terms to refer to the “east” or to “dawn”) and that she was the English equivalent of a German goddess named Ostara.5 These ideas have received varying levels of endorsement from some scholars over the years, but others have questioned such etymologies.6
A second explanation that has become fairly popular, to the point that some standard reference works like the Encyclopedia Britannica have taken it for granted, is that the basic term behind “Easter” is the German equivalent of “dawn,” but that this came from a Latin reference to the week following Easter as hebdomada in albis (“white week”) or simply albae, which was mistranslated into the Old High German plural equivalent for “dawn” Eostarun, which then became the etymological root for “Easter.”7
A third explanation comes from the only book devoted entirely to the subject of the history of the German Ostern by Jürgen Udolph. Udolph argues that Ostern is related to the North Germanic verb ausa, used for various actions with water (such as pouring or drawing), which was related to a Norse ritual of baptism for newborns (vatni ausa: “sprinkling with water”) and was applied to the Christian baptism that was popular on Pascha Sunday.8
A fourth explanation that no longer has purchase in scholarly circles, but has some purchase on several Christian sites, is that Easter and the German Oster (now Ostern) actually derive from the same Old Teutonic root of Auferstehung or auferstehen. The noun is the favored German noun for “resurrection,” and its verbal correspondent auferstehen is likewise the favored German verb for the same concept. As far as I can tell, the ultimate root of this claim comes from Christian Cruse in the nineteenth century in a note he made in his translation of Eusebius’s Church History, even if most do not cite it from him.9 Most online citations of this view ultimately trace back to Nick Sayers, who gives the fullest exposition of this claim at http://www.easterau.com/. In all of these cases, except for Bede, the general presumption is that Easter is ultimately a German product more than an Anglo-Saxon one.
The second and third hypotheses are not entirely unrelated, as the name “white week” came from the fact that the new Christians who had been baptized on Pascha Sunday would wear white robes the following week until the next Sunday, known variously as White Sunday, Low Sunday, or the Octave Day of Easter/Pascha. It would seem intuitive that metonymy could lead to the day being called by a new name based on a ritual that was regularly associated with it. But both of these hypotheses have significant problems. The second hypothesis, despite its popularity, has a rather sizeable flaw in its logic, as Richard Sermon observes, “given that Dominica in albis (white Sunday), which referred to the first Sunday after Easter, was successfully translated into Middle Low German as Witsondach and Middle Dutch as Wittensondaugh, why should there have been a problem translating hebdomada in albis (white week) into German?”10 Although it is not out of the realm of possibility that such a thing could happen, the fact that the hypothesis requires that it had to happen in this one particular instance and that this error happened to snowball through its transmission into English to become the way the vast majority of English-speakers refer to the holiday begins to make the argument seem to rely on convenience.
The third hypothesis falters on the point that Udolph can cite evidence from Old Norse to make his linguistic connection, but not any other Germanic language. But even Old Norse uses other terms for referring to baptism:
Christian baptism was known in Old Norse by names deypa (dip) or skíra (cleanse), and Easter by the name Páskar, none of which derive from the Proto-Germanic root *aus-a. Furthermore, it is only in Old Norse that the verb ausa means “to pour.” Elsewhere in the Germanic language group, words deriving from the same root have the meaning “to draw” or “to scoop.” It should also be noted that our only evidence for the pagan baptism vatni ausa comes from Icelandic manuscripts of the thirteenth-century or later, which may themselves have been influenced by the Christian baptism following the conversion of Iceland in AD 1000.11
Furthermore, the claim that the plural Ostarun refers to multiple baptisms does not comport with the facts that the singular is nowhere used for baptism and that different words are used for baptism in other Germanic sources. Especially important in this regard is the Gothic translation of the Bible in the fourth century, which presents the oldest recorded Germanic word for “baptize” as daupjan.12
There are several problems with the fourth hypothesis. First, we should generally be skeptical of etymologies from the early-to-mid nineteenth century, since there has been plenty of development in the field—especially when it comes to Germanic languages—in the intervening time of almost two centuries. Second, I cannot find any independent confirmation of this claim from German sources or sources that evince knowledge of German and German etymology—as opposed to those who simply repeat this claim. The fact that this does not clearly derive from German is clear in the attempts to justify the etymology as deriving from the combination of ester and stehen or erst and stehen. If the first word in the first pair was capitalized, it would be the German form of Esther, but its current form is not an extant German term as far as I can tell. The first word in the second pair is an adverb that is most often translated as “first” or “only,” neither of which makes sense in this context. In fact, Auferstehung and auferstehen are built on erstehen, which is equivalent to “arise,” as stehen is equivalent to “stand,” both of which fit with how the various terms in Greek that the NT authors use most frequently for resurrection—ἀνάστασις, ἀνίστημι, and ἐγείρω—all basically refer to standing, arising, or awakening. Third, one must wonder, if the term “Easter” came from this derivation, why Bede would apparently be ignorant of it. He was surely closer to older German and Anglo-Saxon than we are, and it would have been an easy equation for him to make, but he does not make it. Fourth, for reasons that I will explain in more detail below, the typical assumption that the term comes from a German derivation is unjustified. As such, even if this German etymology for the name were accurate, it would be irrelevant to this discussion.
This leads us back to the first hypothesis of some connection with a goddess named Eostre. Grimm’s own account of Ostara has no solid evidence to back it up, as it is simply based on linguistic speculation. Nor is it at all clear that Eostre was a goddess of dawn. There was a Germanic Ostarmanoth to correspond to Bede’s Eosturmonath, but this name was instituted by Charlemagne several decades after Bede wrote. Bede’s own etymological account has led many to suggest that it is either mere speculative fantasy or simple invention, in which case a goddess that was never worshipped was invented by Bede to explain a mystery.
But it is important not to dismiss Bede’s claim too easily, especially since we cannot rightfully impute the errors of his more speculative successors on to his simple claim of an Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre having a month named after her. Philip Shaw argues that it is more helpful to understand Eostre as a local goddess, rather than one worshipped throughout either the British Isles or Germany:
If there is one absolutely characteristic feature of the cults of matrons it is that they are fundamentally local. While we might identify matrons as a broad type of deity, we should not lose sight of the fact that their epithets, and the ways in which devotees referred to them in differing geographical and social contexts, seek to locate them in relation to tribal and sub-tribal social groups and their localities.13
This would make sense of the early place names for Eastry in Kent and, possibly, of Eastrington in Yorkshire, which seem to be derived from a potential common root (*ēastor) with Eostre.14 There are also personal names, such as Easterwine (which does not mean “Eostre’s friend,” as the first element in the name is not the feminine form) and Aestorhild (as well as the later Middle English name Estrild).15 These names and the tendencies of matron cults that Shaw analyzes in his book fit better with the idea that Eostre was so named because of her association with the east and with particular social groups, possibly with an emphasis on those in and around Eastry in Kent, than with a cosmic function that she served.16 Whether it was Kent itself or a center of learning in southern England that in the eighth century had a particular interest in native pagan mythology, it could be that the name of the goddess and of the month itself came from a source in such a location.17 Granted, this does not provide us with strong evidence about a cult of Eostre or tell us anything about her other than linguistic links with her name and her plausible association with peoples and locales, but this independent attestation of such a name in Old English sources suggests that there might be some substance to Bede’s claim.
It is also unlikely that Bede invented the idea that this goddess Eostre was worshipped prior to the arrival of Christianity. It is true that his etymologies for the English month names are a mixed bag, with some being likely and others being contrary to sound etymology. However, it is not as if he otherwise had a demonstrable tendency to make up the names of gods and goddesses to explain these month names, even as he did not with the Roman and Greek calendars. The only months he attaches the names of Anglo-Saxon gods/goddesses to are the equivalents of March and April; why did he not do so with any of the other months if he was going about inventing gods or goddesses to explain the month names? If he wanted to be creative with how Eosturmonath got its name, his theologizing about the significance of the date of Easter and on elements of the Pascha show that he could just as well have devised an explanation more directly relevant to the “Paschal month.” Rather, he most likely had a source or sources that suggested otherwise, and he had to account for them.
What then can be said about the relationship of Eostre, Easter, and Ostern? As noted above, the general assumption is that the flow of influence went from German to Anglo-Saxon, and so efforts have typically concentrated on finding the right German root to explain the English word. However, according to Sermon, we should look elsewhere:
Much of Germany was converted to Christianity by Anglo-Saxon clerics such as St Clement (Willibrord, AD 658–739), St Boniface (Winfrith, c. AD 673–754) and St Willibald (c. AD 700–787). These clerics spoke broadly the same language as those they were seeking to convert and, given the date of Bede’s De Temporum Ratione (AD 725), may have been celebrating Easter by that name during the course of their missionary work. This would explain why the name Easter is found in Old English and Old High German … but not in any of the North Germanic languages where versions of the Latin name Pascha are used (Danish/Norwegian Påske and Swedish Påsk).18
This theory also makes sense of why there is no evidence for the cult of Ostara in Germany, why the name of the month Ostarmanoth postdates Bede, and why hypotheses that have attempted to work from the Old German to the Old English have not provided sound conclusions. As such, even in the early days as in the later days, the impetus for calling Pascha “Easter” came from Christians using the term rather than from an inveterate pagan presence and influence. After all, it was the Christians who adapted the Roman names for the days of the week into their current forms with perceived Norse equivalents of the Greco-Roman gods.19 Shaw notes,
The earliest evidence for equations of the great gods with Graeco-Roman deities survives from the Anglo-Saxon, Columbanian and Frankish intellectual powerhouses that were instrumental in the Christianization of much of north-western Europe. It would not be particularly surprising to find that a theophoric week, which originally developed as part of Christian scholarly engagement with the classical past, became so much part of Christian English and Frankish language and culture that it spread to other groups through interactions with the Franks and Anglo-Saxons.20
Bede himself was engaging in this larger endeavor in the context of his reference to Eostre and Eosturmonath, as he discusses the Greek, Roman, and English calendars to make connections between them (The Reckoning of Time 12–15). In the case of the Eosturmonath, he also notes that in his time it had been reconceived as the Paschal month, since Pascha is most frequently observed in April.
In fact, this overall approach—and the specific tendency to preserve the name of Eostre and Eosturmonath—is consistent with the habits of Christianization in the British Isles, as opposed to the habits of Christianization in many other places. The preservation of Eosturmonath, while emptying it of its content and replacing it with the tradition of the Paschal feast celebrating Jesus’s resurrection, follows the paradigm set by Pope Gregory I in a letter he wrote concerning the Christianization of Britain in 601 (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 1.30). He recommended removing idols from the pagan temples but preserving and purifying the temples to serve for churches. With their custom of sacrificing oxen, he recommends replacing the ritual and using the oxen for feasts in gratitude to the true God. He also provides a more general recommendation of removing pagan errors step-by-step to aid the converts, rather than trying to sweep out everything at once. This is the approach Bede took. The Beowulf-poet had a similar method in preserving the memory of the pagan past but placing it in a Christian frame. And so it would make sense that the Christians (especially the monks) who were responsible for the preservation of the memory of much non-Christian culture and literature would likewise be responsible for the preservation of the name of a goddess as well as its use to refer to a holiday celebrating the triumph of God in Jesus.
None of these points necessarily prove that Bede’s etymology is correct, but they do entail that we cannot dismiss his claim out of hand. And while none of the hypotheses reviewed here have truly compelling evidence behind them, the antiquity of this explanation, its comportment with evidence for this goddess Eostre being linked to at least one area of Anglo-Saxon England, and its consistency with the process of Christianizing the British Isles and Germany all support the conclusion that Bede’s explanation is probably the best explanation available. But much like the Norse gods whose names are reflected in four of the seven names of our English weekdays and much like the Roman gods who preceded them in the Latin naming of the weekdays (not to mention six of the twelve months), the only thing Eostre gave to the day we celebrate Jesus’s resurrection is her name. Truly, her name is essentially all that could be given, as we know—or rather, we can reasonably infer—so little about her cult, to the point that some scholars have questioned whether anyone worshiped such a goddess. Some Christians object to this name today as some Christians in Europe once objected to the Latin names for the weekdays, but others saw no problem. For them, these names held no power over their days or months, for there was only power in the name of the triune God. For English-speaking Christians, this matter of naming the day will remain a matter of conscience.
To further complicate matters, even in predominately English-speaking countries, various Christian traditions may refer to the day as Pascha or as some other term derived from a locally popular language. It has also been popular among some English speakers to refer to it simply as “Resurrection Day” or “Resurrection Sunday.” Likewise, while Ostern is the most popular name in German, it is also called Auferstehungsfest, “Resurrection Day” or “Resurrection Feast/Festival.”
This refers to the end of the Lenten fast on the day of Jesus’s resurrection, which traditionally consists of fasting from meat.
I would like to thank the following people for their contributions to these lists of names: Dr. Chelcent Fuad, Dr. Kei Hiramatsu (SSJ), Junwen Ye, Rev. Hunn Choi, Chris Robershaw, Eliza Tan, Sochanngam Shirik, Dr. David Thang Moe, Whitney Bryant, David Kwame Abubekr, Tuck Seon Chung, Ram Budhathoki, Rania Hendy, Akibu Olamiji, Bassey Hogan, Dr. Shivraj Mahendra, Dr. Lalsangkima Pachuau, Suraj Singh, Anup Rai, and Matthias Gergan.
Wallis, Reckoning, 54.
Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, 4th ed., trans. James Steven Stallybrass (London: Bell and Sons, 1882), 290–91.
For some brief reviews of the debates, see Carole M. Cusack, “The Goddess Eostre: Bede’s Text and Contemporary Pagan Tradition(s),” The Pomegranate 9 (2007): 24–28; Philip Shaw, Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons (London: Bristol Classical, 2011), 50–52.
Johann Knobloch, “Der Ursprung von Neuhochdeutsch Ostern, Englisch Easter,” Die Sprache 5 (1959): 27–45.
Jürgen Udolph, Ostern: Geschichte eines Wortes, Indogermanische Bibliothek 3/20 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1999).
Christian Cruse, trans. in Eusebius, An Ecclesiastical History to the Twentieth Year of the Reign of Constantine, Being the 324th of the Christian Era, 4th ed. (London: Bagster and Sons, 1847), 221.
Richard Sermon, “From Easter to Ostara: The Reinvention of a Pagan Goddess?,” Time and Mind 1 (2008): 336.
Ibid.
Ibid., 337.
Philip A. Shaw, Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons (London: Bristol Classical, 2011), 63. This conclusion is based on material covered on 37–48. At the conclusion of this chapter, he states, “Eostre – and perhaps, therefore, other Anglo-Saxon deities as well – appears to have been principally defined by her relationship to a social and geographical grouping. If they believed that she had a specialist function or functions, we have no evidence for this belief – and the etymological connections of her name suggest that her worshippers saw her geographical and social relationship with them as more central than any functions she may have had” (71).
Ibid., 59–60. These spellings include Eastrgena, Eastrege, Eostorege, Eosterege, and Eosterge.
Ibid., 60; contra Sermon, “Easter,” 334.
Shaw, Pagan Goddesses, 38–46, 64–68.
Ibid., 65.
Sermon, “Easter,” 337.
Philip Shaw, “The Origins of the Theophoric Week in the Germanic Languages,” Early Medieval Europe 15 (2007): 386–401, esp. 396–97: “The earliest references to these deities are, then, predominantly the work of men who were brought up reading classical Latin texts, men who were professional Christians whose lives turned around the seven-day week that regulated monastic life. They did not pluck these deities out of the air – no doubt they were worshipped in the early Middle Ages in at least some Germanic areas – but they were clearly in a position to have a massive impact on the diffusion of these deities in Christian Germanic culture. The Old English glossaries provide evidence of deliberate, scholarly efforts to equate Mercury with Wodan and Mars with Tiw and Jove with Thonar. In such an intellectual climate, we should not be surprised if Christian scholars also made use of these equations to loan-translate the Latin days of the week. This might also explain the presence of Saturn in untranslated form in the Germanic day-names: this is the one deity for whom no obvious parallel exists among the deities known to early medieval Christian authors.”
Ibid., 400.